From the viewpoint of product management and maintenance of printing quality, there is an image forming apparatus that writes maintenance information such as the consumption of a toner in a storage section, such as an IC chip, mounted on an exclusive toner cartridge and performs product management in a toner cartridge unit.
In such an image forming apparatus in which the IC chip is mounted on the toner cartridge, in order to estimate the consumption of a toner, time of use of the toner is measured in a unit of operation time of a toner motor and a value measured by the measurement is written in the IC chip.
Specifically, if the toner motor operates for a predetermined time, a counter value is counted up by one. Every time the counter value is counted up, the counter value stored in an image forming apparatus main body is written on the IC chip side.
Such an operation is likely to affect the life of the IC chip because the number of times of writing in the IC chip increases. Usually, the IC chip includes a nonvolatile memory such as an EEPROM. In the current EEPROM technique, from the viewpoint of guarantee of reliability, a limit of an extremely small number of times of access is provided for the number of times of writing compared with a limit for the number of times of reading.
According to an embodiment, there is provided an image forming apparatus and a control method therefor that can substantially reduce the number of times of writing in an IC chip compared with that in the past and correctly match counter values on a main body side and a toner side each other even if a toner cartridge is replaced in maintenance or the like.